Jodi Dean

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism. The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win brings together three decades of Black Communist women's political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century. Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.

Black Communist Women's Political Writing

Organize, Fight, Win

When people say “comrade,” they change the world In the twentieth century, millions of people across the globe addressed each other as “comrade.” Now, among the left, it’s more common to hear talk of “allies.” In Comrade, Jodi Dean insists that this shift exemplifies the key problem with the contemporary left: the substitution of political identity for a relationship of political belonging that must be built, sustained, and defended. Dean offers a theory of the comrade. Comrades are equals on the same side of a political struggle. Voluntarily coming together in the struggle for justice, their relationship is characterized by discipline, joy, courage, and enthusiasm. Considering the egalitarianism of the comrade in light of differences of race and gender, Dean draws from an array of historical and literary examples such as Harry Haywood, C.L.R. James, Alexandra Kollontai, and Doris Lessing. She argues that if we are to be a left at all, we have to be comrades.

An Essay on Political Belonging

Comrade

In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of international banking has alerted exploited populations the world over to the unsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetual growth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodation with capitalism. In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organize on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party. An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.

The Communist Horizon

Tina Landis

Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason. Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.

Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

In recent decades, media outlets in the United States—most notably the Internet—have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because "the public needs to know." In Publicity's Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the public's demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the "public sphere" endanger democratic politics in the information age. Dean's argument is built around analyses of Bill Gates, Theodore Kaczynski, popular journalism, the Internet and technology, as well as the conspiracy theory subculture that has marked American history from the Declaration Independence to the political celebrity of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author claims that the media's insistence on the public's right to know leads to the indiscriminate investigation and dissemination of secrets. Consequently, in her view, the theoretical ideal of the public sphere, in which all processes are transparent, reduces real-world politics to the drama of the secret and its discovery.

How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy

Publicity's Secret

Zizek's Politics

Discusses the social and political implications of widespread belief in unidentified flying objects, extraterrestrials, and government cover-ups, and considers what they reveal in a culture of mass media and conflicting evidence

Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace

Aliens in America

How do mass protests become an organized activist collective? Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state—such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world—they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise—they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.

Crowds and Party

Paul Andrew Passavant

Framing the debate about "Empire," this landmark new book brings together leading scholars to make sense of "Empire"'s new vocabulary and tackle its claims head on.

Reading Hardt and Negri

Empire's New Clothes

Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives.

Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive

Blog Theory

Bruno Bosteels

Giuseppe Cocco

Communist Currents

No século XX, milhões de pessoas em todo o globo se dirigiam umas às outras como "camarada". Hoje, em círculos de esquerda é mais comum ouvir falar em "aliados". Neste livro, Jodi Dean insiste no fato de que essa mudança exemplifica o problema fundamental da esquerda contemporânea: a sobreposição da identidade política a uma relação de pertencimento político que precisa ser construída, sustentada e defendida. Neste ensaio com recortes e análises bastante originais, Dean nos oferece uma teoria da camaradagem. Camaradas são pessoas que se encontram de um mesmo lado de uma luta política. Unindo-se voluntariamente por justiça, sua relação é caracterizada por disciplina, coragem e entusiasmo. Analisando o igualitarismo da figura do camarada à luz das diferenças de raça e gênero, Dean recorre a um leque de exemplos históricos e literários, como os de Harry Haywood, C. L. R. James, Aleksandra Kollontai e Doris Lessing. Eis um livro curto que articula história, psicanálise e filosofia num texto prazeroso de ler como ensaio de interesse geral.

Um ensaio sobre pertencimento político

Camarada

Critique Or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics

Gregory Sholette

William L. Fox

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Andreas Kühne

Lukáš Likavčan

Susanne M. Winterling

Arie Altena

Clausthome

Mārtiņš Ratniks

Flavia Dzodan

Rana Hamadeh

The Living and The Dead Ensemble

The Rodina

Sasha Litvintseva

Beny Wagner

Stoffel Debuysere

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

Filipa César

Ephraim Asili

Polina Medvedeva

Ana Vaz

Jennifer Walshe

Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou

This book draws from our quarter-of-a-century festival ‘celebration’, but it is not dedicated to ‘looking back’ on the way Sonic Acts, along with the world, has changed. Rather, it is devoted to finding ways of confronting and surviving the brutality of now. It contains a rare selection of critical essays on contemporary political and climate realities, colonial legacies of European projects, and racial and gender biases of contemporary technologies. Visual and textual contributions highlight an evocative approach to writing, merging field notes and memoir, to accurately capture the processes of making work fuelled by research. It also contains tender contributions that embed modes of discourse within the visual, in order to gauge the complexities and interconnections of this crisis and re-imagine a different reality.

Hereafter

A critical introduction to the political thought of one of the most important, original and enigmatic philosophers writing today. Zizek's Politics provides an original interpretation and defence of the Slovenian philosopher's radical critique of liberalism, democracy, and global capital.

Žižek's Politics

Resiting the Political

Feminism and the New Democracy

Geert Lovink

Jon W. Anderson

This book examines the ways in which new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are being used by civil society organizations (CSOs) to achieve their aims through activities and networks that cross national borders. These new ICTs (the internet, mobile phones, satellite radio and television) have allowed these civil society organizations to form extensive networks linking the local and the global in new ways and to flourish internationally in ways that were not possible without them. Reformatting Politics consists of four sections containing essays by some of the top scholars and activists working at the intersections of networked societies, civil society organizations, and information technology. The book also includes a section that takes a critical look at the UN World Summit of Information Society and the role that global governance has played and will play in the use and dissemination of these new technologies. Finally, the contributors aim to influence this important and emerging field of inquiry by posing a set of questions and directions for future research. In sum, Reformatting Politics is a fresh look at the way critical network practice through the use of information technology is reformatting the terms and terrains of global politics.

Information Technology and Global Civil Society

Reformatting Politics

Jodi Dean

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